Essays on structural analysis of procurement auctions.

详细信息   

• 作者：Yu ; Bin.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2007
• 导师：Lee, Lung-fei
• 毕业院校：Ohio State University
• 专业：Economics, General.
• ISBN：9780549074038
• CBH：3268906
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：726628
• Pages：145

文摘

This dissertation addresses the empirical analysis of procurements based on the auction theory, which is known as the structural-form analysis of procurement auctions.;The first essay studies the nonparametric estimation of asymmetric procurement auctions and the empirically implementable bandwidth selection methods in the finite-sample estimation of procurement auctions with heterogeneity in the project sizes. Guerre, Perrigne and Vuong (2000) (GPV) proposed a two-step nonparametric estimator and established its property of uniform convergence under the appropriate bandwidth choices. However, their theoretical bandwidth falls short of providing the practical guidance for empirical applications. In this essay we develop an empirical bandwidth selection rule for the nonparametric estimator under the GPV specification. We also propose a conditional hazard rate based nonparametric estimator and develop its empirical bandwidth selection rule. By conducting Monte Carlo experiments of a simulated auction model, we demonstrate that when the heterogeneity of the project size exists as in any typical auction data, the proposed bandwidth selection rules under both the GPV and the conditional-hazard-rate based specifications produce on average much improved estimates of the unobserved cost and its distribution than the commonly adopted bandwidth selection rule in the literature. Further, the conditional hazard rate based specification is more preferred in this context. Then we apply the conditional hazard rate based nonparametric estimator with its bandwidth selection rule to an empirical analysis of the Ohio highway procurement market. Two types of firms, regular or fringe according to the frequency of bidding, are studied in terms of their respective markups and the project-dependent cost information structures in this market. In contrast to the usual point of view that regular firms have a cost advantage over fringe firms, our finding is that this conclusion holds only when the project is of relatively large size. In projects of small size, fringe firms can enjoy a cost advantage.;The second essay studies the identi.cation and estimation of procurement auction models with the endogenous entry of potential firms. Two different procurement auction models with endogenous entry are studied. The procurement auction model with the bid-preparation cost follows from an irrevocable and nontrivial entry expense, which is incurred after a potential firm observes its private project cost. The procurement auction model with the information-gathering cost follows from an irrevocable and nontrivial entry expense, which is incurred before a potential firm observes its private project cost. In this essay we show how each of these two auction models with the endogenous entry can be identified and estimated from the data. We also establish the identification result in a broader sense: we can differentiate these two models by only using the data of observed bids. Finally, we empirically analyze the Michigan highway procurement market where the endogenous participation of potential firms can be justified. By applying the established identification criterion and checking the model implications, we conclude that the procurement auction model with the bid-preparation cost is more appropriate to explain the observed participation and bidding strategies of the potential firms in the Michigan highway procurement market. We also use the Bayesian method to recover the project cost distribution and the entry cost distribution in this market.